Facebook Testing Ability to Snooze Keywords for 30 Days

[MacRumors]

Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch that it's testing an ability for its users to "snooze" certain keywords in their News Feed and groups for 30 days. The text-based snooze follows an update from late last year that introduced a way for users to snooze people, pages, and groups for 30 days.

In order to start snoozing keywords, users will first have to come across a post that includes the keyword they want to avoid, as there's no dedicated section to enter keywords into. Facebook has said that a "preemptive snooze option" is being looked into and could be added in the next few weeks.

Image via TechCrunch​

For now, once a post is spotted users will find a new "Snooze keywords in this post" option in the ellipsis drop-down menu. From there, Facebook will generate a list of nouns gathered from the post that are available to snooze for one month. TechCrunch gave one example of how this might work for avoiding spoilers in the World Cup:

Tapping that reveals a list of nouns from the post you might want to nix, without common words like "the" in the way. So if you used the feature on a post that said "England won its World Cup game against Tunisia! Yes!", the feature would pull out "World Cup", "England", and "Tunisia". Select all that you want to snooze, and posts containing them will be hidden for a month. Currently, the feature only works on text, not images, and won't suggest synonyms you might want to snooze as well.

Ads won't be affected by snoozed keywords, so if you snooze something related to a movie the feature will only hide posts by friends and groups, but not ad posts encouraging Facebook users to visit the film's page or buy tickets.

In regards to the 30-day limit, Facebook mentioned that it is open to expanding the snooze feature if it hears from people "that they want more or less time," but didn't confirm an unlimited ability to snooze keywords. In comparison, Twitter and many related third-party clients offer the ability for users to mute keywords, users, hashtags, and more for as long as they want.

For Facebook's keyword snooze feature, a "small percentage of users" will see the update today ahead of a wider rollout in the coming weeks.

Article Link: Facebook Testing Ability to Snooze Keywords for 30 Days

 

[djeeyore25]

After I'm done snoozing all the political nonsense on Facebook, my news feed will just be a picture of a tumbleweed.

 

[nelsonammo]

I would love to snooze "Star Wars" "Marvel" "Donald Trump"

 

[martyjmclean]

another feature they’re taking from Twitter...

 

[autrefois]

Can you snooze the word Facebook?

 

[TMRJIJ]

What a coincidence. I just snoozed the Facebook app notifications about three weeks ago

Also, what prevents this feature from cleaning out my News Feed completely with the exception of ads? Lots of keywords piss me off on there.

 

[Exile714]

You know what killed Facebook? Algorithms. They decided it wasn’t ok for people to just see a line of posts and updates from their friends, they needed to be the ones choosing which posts were seen and when.

The end result is people miss things they want to see, and are bombarded with the same posts over and over. Forget the politics stuff, most of which is overblown, the death of Facebook began with the algorithm. This “snooze” feature is just another way Facebook wants to try to control what people see, and it’s killing their brand.

 

[nviz22]

Definitely want to snooze all the World Cup and political stuff.

 

[mungo2k]

Trump.
Brexit.

I don't think there will be anything left.

 

[EdT]

Will it accept Wildcards for a search term? Will there be a Wildcard comparable to ‘*’ ?

 

[now i see it]

People must've leaving FB in droves. Its been nothing but damage control at FB ever since the Cambridge Analyitica fiasco.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

I snoozed Facebook itself months ago. Depressing service we people displaying their unreal lives.

 

[Ciclismo]

I preempted this feature 3 weeks ago by simply deleting my Facebook account. Felt weird the first week, but now I’ve noticed how much more time I have because I’m not busy reading through all the drivel.

 

[CarpalMac]

Trump.
Brexit.

I don't think there will be anything left.

I could definitely live with that.

"Hey, it’s all gonna work out, here’s sports!" - Bill Hicks

 

[EdT]

People must've leaving FB in droves. Its been nothing but damage control at FB ever since the Cambridge Analyitica fiasco.

People aren’t, 15-25 year olds are. Many times they are just moving to another social media program and it’s not because of privacy concerns or being angry at what FB has done as a business but because their parents or other Old People use Facebook and that not cool.

A lot of them turn to Instagram and it’s OWNED by Facebook.

 

[mollyc]

I use the Facebook Purity extension for my desktop browser and it’s awesome. You can filter out words, phrases, sidebar junk and keep the feed sorted for most recent.

 

[SeattleMoose]

Been snoozing on Facebook for years. 5 to be exact.